02/01/05

Welcome to my blog. I'm Robert Brewer, the Manager of Information Systems for Amor Ministries. "FuManChu" has been my radio handle since I started working in Ciudad Juarez in 1993, building homes for the poor.

After five years in the field, I moved into IT. During the past six years, I've built and rebuilt our core business-process application. The first version was a client-server app in VB4; that moved to a webapp within a year or two. In 2003-2004, I rewrote the entire thing in Python, including a standalone application framework (Cation) and Object-Relational Mapper (Dejavu).

I also managed everything else (networking, mail, file servers, backups, desktops, antivirus, you name it) until I got a PFY (an assistant), Ryan, in early 2001. Now I tend to advise and design top-level architecture in those areas, and let Ryan do the hard work.

Don't be surprised if I discuss topics other than computers, however! I enjoy almost anything done well. Drop me a line or a comment if you are able.

My company, Amor Ministries, has been talking about staff websites since...well, forever. We've toyed with various ideas and CMS systems. I even wrote one myself for HTML editing called Tibia. However, nothing seemed to solidify--the burden on the authors is usually too great.

Last week, I floated the concept of blogs past Alon, our Development Team leader, and for the first time, his desires and the available tech started to gel very nicely. We made a short laundry list of desirable features for blog software, and the result will be built here.

I went with b2evolution because:

It is the most multi-blog friendly.

It's free and open-source. Free is always nice, of course, but the modifications we wanted pretty much forced an OSS solution.

It seemed the cleanest of the few I downloaded and evaluated (including Nucleus, Wordpress, and Serendipity). "Clean" in both on-screen appearance, and the codebase (again, to make our mods easier).

Feeds are built in and on by default.

The first features I'm looking to write (and contribute back to b2evo, if they'll answer my email):

Profanity filter. A simple one--no boiling of any oceans. This is already done, btw.